Mirror Image

“What?” The supervisor turned back to his work on the charred heap of matter that had once been a human body.

“The dental records of Avery Daniels,” Grayson said. “Casualty number eighty-seven.”

“She’s already been IDed and autopsied.” The supervisor consulted the chart on the wall, just to make certain. A red line had been drawn through her name. “Yep.”

“I know, but—”

“She had no living relatives. A close family friend IDed her this afternoon.”

“But these records—”

“Look, pal,” the supervisor said with asperity, “I got bodies with no heads, hands without arms, feet without legs. And they’re on my ass to finish this tonight. So if somebody’s been positively IDed, autopsied, and sealed shut, don’t bother me with records, okay?”

Grayson stuffed the dental X-rays back into the manila envelope they had arrived in and sailed it toward a trash barrel. “Okay. Fine. And in the meantime, fuck you.”

“Sure, sure—any time. As soon as we get all these stiffs IDed.”

Grayson shrugged. They weren’t paying him to be Dick Tracy. If nobody else gave a damn about a mysterious inconsistency, why should he? He went back to matching up dental records with the corpses as yet to be identified.

Three

The weather seemed to be in mourning, too.

It rained the day of Avery Daniels’s funeral. The night before, thunderstorms had rumbled through the Texas hill country. This morning, all that was left of them was a miserable, cold, gray rain.

Bareheaded, impervious to the inclement weather, Irish McCabe stood beside the casket. He had insisted on a spray of yellow roses, knowing they had been her favorite. Vivid and flamboyant, they seemed to be mocking death. He took comfort in that.

Tears rolled down his ruddy checks. His fleshy, veined nose was redder than usual, although he hadn’t been drinking so much lately. Avery nagged him about it, saying an excessive amount of alcohol wasn’t good for his liver, his blood pressure, or his expanding midsection.

She nagged Van Lovejoy about his chemical abuses, too, but he had showed up at her funeral high on cheap Scotch and the joint he had smoked on the drive to the chapel. The outmoded necktie around his ill-fitting collar was a concession to the solemnity of the occasion and attested to the fact that he held Avery in higher regard than he did most members of the human family.

Other people regarded Van Lovejoy no more favorably than he did them. Avery had numbered among the very few who could tolerate him. When the reporter assigned to cover the story of her tragic death for KTEX’s news asked Van if he would shoot the video, the photographer had glared at him with contempt, shot him the finger, and slunk out of the newsroom without a word. This rude mode of self-expression was typical of Van, and just one of the reasons for his alienation from mankind.

At the conclusion of the brief interment service, the mourners began making their way

down the gravel path toward the row of cars parked in the lane, leaving only Irish and Van at the grave. At a discreet distance, cemetery employees were waiting to finish up so they could retreat indoors, where it was warm and dry.

Van was fortyish and string-bean thin. His belly was concave and there was a pronounced stoop to his bony shoulders. His thin hair hung straight down from a central part, reaching almost to his shoulders and framing a thin, narrow face. He was an aging hippie who had never evolved from the sixties.

By contrast, Irish was short and robust. While Van looked like he could be carried off by a strong gust of wind, Irish looked like he could stand forever if he firmly planted his feet on solid ground. As different as they were physically, today their postures and bleak expressions were reflections of each other. Of the two, however, Irish’s suffering was the more severe.

In a rare display of compassion, Van laid a skinny, pale hand on Irish’s shoulder. “Let’s go get shit-faced.”

Irish nodded absently. He stepped forward and plucked one of the yellow rosebuds off the spray, then turned and let Van precede him from beneath the temporary tent and down the path. Raindrops splashed against his face and on the shoulders of his overcoat, but he didn’t increase his stolid pace.

“I, uh, rode here in the limousine,” he said, as though just remembering that when he reached it.

“Wanna go back that way?”

Irish looked toward Van’s battered heap of a van. “I’ll go with you.” He dismissed the funeral home driver with a wave of his hand and climbed inside the van. The interior was worse than the exterior. The ripped upholstery was covered with a ratty beach towel, and the maroon carpet lining the walls reeked of stale marijuana smoke.

Van climbed into the driver’s seat and started the motor. While it was reluctantly warming up, he lit a cigarette with long, nicotine-stained fingers and passed it to Irish.

“No thanks.” Then, after a seconds’ reconsideration, Irish took the cigarette and inhaled deeply. Avery had gotten him to quit smoking. It had been months since he’d had a cigarette. Now, the tobacco smoke stung his mouth and throat. “God, that’s good,” he sighed as he inhaled again.

“Where to?” Van asked around the cigarette he was lighting for himself.

“Any place where we’re not known. I’m likely to make a spectacle of myself.”